Joan Brigham. Steamshuffle. Circa 1977-79

“Poems appear by walking along” this installation.

More on this environmental artist here, here, and here.

Thanks to artist Lauren Shaw (www.laurenshaw.com) for the introduction to this work.

To the Choirmaster

From The Boston Globe:

How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.

Monday summer officially begins, and freed from the hunker-inducing cold, New Englanders’ imaginations have already turned to vacation: to idle afternoons and road trips, to the beach and the Berkshires. School is out, and the warm weekends stretch before us, waiting to be filled. Of course, this creates its own pressures. Where to go? When? What to do? Is it better to try somewhere new and exotic, or return to a well-loved spot? Doze on the beach or hike the ancient ruins? Hoard vacation days for a grand tour, or spread them around? Time off is a scarce resource, and as with any scarce resource, we want to spend it wisely. Partly, these decisions are matters of taste. But there are also, it turns out, answers to be found in behavioral science, which increasingly is yielding insights that can help us make the most of our leisure time. Psychologists and economists have looked in some detail at vacations — what we want from them and what we actually get out of them. They have advice about what really matters, and it’s not necessarily what we would expect.

For example, how long we take off probably counts for less than we think, and in the aggregate, taking more short trips leaves us happier than taking a few long ones. We’re often happier planning a trip than actually taking it. And interrupting a vacation — far from being a nuisance — can make us enjoy it more. How a trip ends matters more than how it begins, who you’re with matters as much as where you go, and if you want to remember a vacation vividly, do something during it that you’ve never done before. And though it may feel unnecessary, it’s important to force yourself to actually take the time off in the first place — people, it turns out, are as prone to procrastinate when it comes to pleasurable things like vacations as unpleasant ones like paperwork and visits to the dentist. “How do we optimize our vacation?” asks Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of the new book “The Upside of Irrationality.” “There are three elements to it — anticipating, experiencing, and remembering. They’re not the same, and there are different ways to change each.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.” This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer? Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

More here.

Bernard Avishai in The Nation:

Insanity, they say, is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Actually, that is just scientific irrationality. In human affairs, alas, insanity is doing the same thing and expecting the same result. A case in point is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, which—considering what happened at the University of California, Berkeley, in late April, and off the Gaza coast in late May—will be coming soon to a campus near you.

If you missed it, Berkeley's student senate passed a BDS resolution against Israel, targeting General Electric and United Technologies, which presumably support Israel's occupation force. The student president vetoed the resolution. The senate then failed to override it, but the vote was thirteen to five in favor, with one abstention. The reports I've read of the debate suggest people falling into a familiar pattern: professors, students, union activists, etc. torturing logic to depict Israel's faults—which are serious enough to be unique—as “apartheid,” while rehearsing the principles of action that arguably worked against South Africa a generation ago.

I say “arguably” because some of apartheid's most courageous critics, who helped to bring about an end to white rule, were opposed to B and D, even when they cautiously favored S. In 1987, when I was an editor of the Harvard Business Review, I interviewed Tony Bloom, CEO of the South African food processing giant Premier Group. Early on, Bloom rejected apartheid's foundations, and his company hired political detainees after they were released from prison. He had been among the small group of white business leaders who risked all in 1985 to meet with ANC leaders in Zambia—a great turning point. He befriended future South African President Thabo Mbeki and worked to support the transition to democracy. Though he eventually moved to London, he continued to transform his conglomerate into a model postapartheid firm.

What Bloom told me in 1987 was that, yes, foreign government sanctions on South African trade made sense in certain cases. But the boycott of South African universities and business people, and especially divestment campaigns against international companies doing business in the country, were seriously counterproductive. Why? Because those actions generally undermined the very people who advanced cosmopolitan values in the country. To get social change, you need social champions, in management as in universities.

Via Andrew Sullivan, Ed Moses on fusion, as well as this video at the National Ignition Facility, which uses lasers to heat hydrogen to the point at which a fusion reaction takes place:

The question, Moses said, is “Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?” The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers—coherent light—at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: “no mass, no charge, just energy.”

Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world.

To get a working prototype of a fusion power plant may take 10 years. It will require an engine that runs at about 600 rpm—like an idling car. Targets need to be fired at a rate of 10 per second into the laser flashes. The energy is collected by molten salt at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then heats the usual steam-turbine tea kettle to generate electricity. The engine could operate at the scale of a standard 1-gigawatt coal or nuclear plant, or it could be scaled down to 250 megawatts or up to 3 gigawatts. The supply of several million targets a year can be manufactured for under 50 cents apiece with the volume and precision that Lego blocks currently are. Moses said that 1 liter of heavy water will yield the energy of 2 million gallons of gas.

Fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission.

Also this talk by Steven Cowley, on how fusion is energy's future:

From The Nation:

“This is the only drama in Dickinson's life that's not of her making,” says Lyndall Gordon in Lives Like Loaded Guns, her account not only of the life but of the afterlife of Emily Dickinson, an afterlife that continues to be shaped to this day by the internecine warfare within her immediate family, their progeny and their associates. The writer of the thank-you notes is Dickinson, infamous recluse, the author of some 1,775 poems, almost all of which remained unpublished until after her death. The adulterers are Austin Dickinson, her brother, and Mabel Loomis Todd, who first laid eyes on Dickinson only when she was lying in her coffin but who became the first editor of Dickinson's poems. Austin's spurned wife is Susan Gilbert Dickinson, with whom Dickinson shared 276 of her poems, including many of her greatest.

“With the exception of Shakespeare,” wrote Dickinson to Sue, “you have told me of more knowledge than any one living.” Sue would eventually publish some of the poems in her possession, and her daughter Mattie would continue until her death in 1943 to exert her mother's right to do so. Until her death in 1968, Mabel Loomis Todd's daughter Millicent would exert her mother's right to do the same thing, a right that was perhaps unintentionally bequeathed to her by Dickinson's sister, Vinnie, who asked Mabel to transcribe the hundreds of poems found in Dickinson's bedroom after her death. Lies, vendettas and lawsuits proliferated: a drama of marital infidelity was played out over the dead poet's manuscripts with an intricacy that Henry James could not have imagined. The last major player in this drama, Mary Hampson (the wife of Mattie's companion, Alfred Leete Hampson), died in 1988. Until the end, she lived in the house that Dickinson's father built for Austin and Sue, the Evergreens, and the house has remained basically unchanged since the poet's lifetime. Dickinson last entered the Evergreens on the night of October 4, 1883, when she came to sit beside her dying nephew, Gib. Today, Gib's rocking horse still stands in a shroud of dust beside his bed.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Not everyone has a perfect sense of direction, whether they would like to admit it or not. But two new studies have found that even baby rats have a basic spatial framework in their brains ready to use as soon as they leave the nest for the first time—which is much earlier than had previously been documented. The findings reveal that not all sense of space is learned. They show that at least some of that sense is innate, “that the basic constituents of the cognitive map develop independently of spatial experience or might even precede it,” noted the authors of one of the new studies, both published online June 17 in Science.

For the two independent studies researchers record rats' neuronal firings as soon as newborn pups opened their eyes and began to explore their surroundings. Both teams were surprised to find adult-level cell function in some of the directional regions. At this age, “the animals would not yet have had a chance to explore the environment beyond their nest,” Francesca Cacucci, a researcher at the Institute of Behavioral Neuroscience at University College London and co-author of one of the papers, writes in an e-mail. “This suggests strongly that sense of direction is independent of spatial experience.”

More here.

Beauty is a fickle mistress. For the ancient Greeks it was a pale complexion, courtesy of a thick layer of poisonous white lead; for 16th-century Italians Titian’s well-rounded “Venus of Urbino” was the last word in female beauty; and today glossy magazines glorify wide-eyed teenage waifs. “Beauty,” wrote Umberto Eco in his study of European aesthetics On Beauty (2004), “has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.” Yet if the definition of beauty is ever shifting, how can we make sense of its significance? Perhaps the easiest solution is to dismiss the concept of beauty as human folly. Dostoyevsky observed that “beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil war for the soul of man”, and others have seen our obsession with beauty as merely a flaw to be ironed out through religion or moral instruction. Vanity has been pilloried for its meaningless transience, from the Bible to 16th-century Flemish paintings. Rosie Boycott, a founder of the 1970s feminist magazine Spare Rib, hoped that women would become less obsessed with their looks, as fellow feminists rallied against the oppressive cosmetics industry which, they believed, forced women to aspire to be beautiful. But these criticisms have had no visible effect on our love affair with beauty. From the writers, philosophers and artists who have studied its meaning to the glossy magazines and cosmetics-obsessed consumers who fund a multibillion-dollar industry, for each generation the mystery of beauty remains a subject irresistible to scrutiny, as three recent books show.

more from Nicola Copping at the FT here.

Bissell was born in 1974, which puts him on the cusp of gaming’s generational divide. That transitional position affords him a perspective not unlike — if you’ll indulge the grandiose analogy — that of Tocqueville or McLuhan, figures who stood on the bridges of two great ages, welcoming the horizon while also mourning what the world was leaving behind. Bissell sees video games with open eyes. His book is about the profoundly ambivalent experience of playing them — close readings (close playings?) mostly of big-budget action and science fiction titles for consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation. These are the games most likely to draw a disparaging remark from a United States senator or a newspaper film critic. “Extra Lives” is a celebration of why they matter, but it is also a jeremiad about “why they do not matter more.” Bissel, a contributing editor at Har­per’s Magazine who teaches fiction writing at Portland State University, cops to spending more than 200 hours playing one game, some 80 hours another. “The pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar,” he writes. “Today, the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games.” He says this despite encountering “appalling” dialogue, despite hearing actors give line readings of “autistic miscalculation,” despite despairing over the sense that gamers and game designers have embraced “an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization.” Despite all this, the interactive nature of video games enables moments that Bissell calls “as gripping as any fiction I have come across.”

more from Chris Suellentrop at the NYT here.

“Revolver,” on the other hand, unfurls at breakneck speed, with an unhinged, almost drunken vigor to the deliberately rough drawings. Though the plot is fairly involved, it never feels claustrophobic. Thanks in part to Kindt’s unadorned, noir-inflected writing, Sam’s existential dilemma is as exciting as watching him and Jan kick in doors and elude snipers. As I read “Revolver,” I couldn’t help thinking of the more famous “Revolver,” the Beatles’ landmark 1966 album. Devin McKinney’s description of it, in “Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History,” as a sort of pop schizophrenia, seems not irrelevant to the subject at hand. “Revolver” is multicolored music in a black-and-white wrapper, terse pop songs of dream, escape, cynicism, forebodings… By its exploratory nature an affirmation of life and possibility, a bold and radical advance upon the new horizon, the album was at the same time fourteen kinds of oblivion served on a Top 40 platter: nostalgic about what had been, and paranoid about what it saw coming.

more from Ed Park at the LAT here.

In the NYT:

José Saramago, the Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998 with novels that combine surrealist experimentation and a kind of sardonic peasant pragmatism, died Friday at his home in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. He was 87. The cause was multiple organ failure after a long illness, the José Saramago Foundation said in an announcement on its Web site.

Mr. Saramago, a tall, commandingly austere man with a dry, schoolmasterly manner, gained international acclaim for novels like “Baltasar and Blimunda” and “Blindness.” (A film adaptation of “Blindness” by the Brazilian director Fernando Mireilles was released in 2008.)

Mr. Saramago was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize, and more than two million copies of his books have been sold, his friend and editor, Zeferino Coelho, said.

Mr. Saramago was known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction. In later years he used his status as a Nobel laureate to deliver lectures at international congresses around the world, accompanied by his wife, the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. He described globalization as the new totalitarianism and lamented contemporary democracy’s failure to stem the increasing powers of multinational corporations.